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Kickstarter-Based Open-Source GPU Launches

10-09-2013, 11:40 AM

Phoronix: Kickstarter-Based Open-Source GPU Launches

As first reported yesterday on Phoronix, there's a new effort to raise one million dollars for a LGPLv3-licensed FPGA-based shader-supported graphics processor. Today the Kickstarter campaign kicked off with details in full on this new project...

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LOL, this will never have the performance of an el cheapo gfx card from either Nvidia or AMD. What we really need is to support AMD drivers.

And the libertarians will never control the house and senate... so I should vote for a Republican or a Democrat? I personally wish there were like/disklike votes currently its like facebook only haveing only a like button. But come on... do you trust Nvidia and AMD to continue making 3D hardware for all the devices you want 3D acceleration in indefinitly? As far as that goes they don't even do that now!

I want to be able to hook up my own 3D accelerator to ANYTHING I make or own... without the requirement that it have a PCI-e bus or whatever the powers that be whim I hook it up to.

Performance is not the point... choice is. You don't like what the world is changing into... well do something about it and change this particular aspect for the better. Also if they designed a unified shader... I don't see any reason it couldn't approach the speed of any of the mobile GPUs some of which are in fact quite fast.

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And the libertarians will never control the house and senate... so I should vote for a Republican or a Democrat? I personally wish there were like/disklike votes currently its like facebook only haveing only a like button. But come on... do you trust Nvidia and AMD to continue making 3D hardware for all the devices you want 3D acceleration in indefinitly? As far as that goes they don't even do that now!

I want to be able to hook up my own 3D accelerator to ANYTHING I make or own... without the requirement that it have a PCI-e bus or whatever the powers that be whim I hook it up to.

Performance is not the point... choice is. You don't like what the world is changing into... well do something about it and change this particular aspect for the better. Also if they designed a unified shader... I don't see any reason it couldn't approach the speed of any of the mobile GPUs some of which are in fact quite fast.

Would be nice words if all this did not depend on capitalist enterprises.
why would not you want an PCI-e?
All this is commerce, even to use the computer is for a capitalist purpose.
there is no fun in this world. maybe illusion with games to get away from reality.
if you do not want to participate in this world, you just go for what's left of the forests and perhaps practice magic or something more in touch with nature.
everything else is illusory and fascist utopia.

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Would be nice words if all this did not depend on capitalist enterprises.
why would not you want an PCI-e?
All this is commerce, even to use the computer is for a capitalist purpose.
there is no fun in this world. maybe illusion with games to get away from reality.
if you do not want to participate in this world, you just go for what's left of the forests and perhaps practice magic or something more in touch with nature.
everything else is illusory and fascist utopia.

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Looks like they could fit thier 3D design in an Artix-7 100T which is $115 for the chip. so it should be possible to make a board for around $175-250 just guesstimating it. Using the Artix-7 200T part would drive up cost about another $70 but might allow prototyping the unified shaders. Or alternatively $90 on top of the Artix-7 100T would get you a kintex-7 160T which might also fit a unified shader and is a faster part (8x PCIe , more on chip ram, ideally double to triple the performance)

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I'm not sure this is needed really as intel's drivers are open sourced and have far more functionality. They are improving the performance nicely with each version of mesa, by the time this $1m goal is met in q1 2015 intel's drivers will probably be pretty stable and quite fast especially considering the speed of the on-chip gpu's that will be coming out by then.

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I did - the main reason is that if successful - there will be a lot more people hacking on graphics. How can this be a bad thing for the open source drivers if there are more people around working on them.

I can think of many little projects that could benefit from a small open source GPU in the DIY community.

There is also a small chance that this sort of project might show the way (at least in some part) for other hardware companies wanting a better driver stack.